Monday 14 November 2011

What's happening November 2011

The results for the poll "When buying music..." from 72 voters were:

35 (48%) I just pirate music, arrr
30 (41%) I want a CD in my hands
7  ( 9%) Online music stores are great

This actually didn't surprise me at all - well, perhaps everyone's honesty did!  What I did take from that is not to bother putting up pay per download music...if I did ever want to take the time and effort to create really nice recordings I should put them on a CD and offer them for sale.  As for pirating music, well, is youtube not the king of music pirates?  You can listen to _and_ watch any song you can think of, "for free", maybe have to watch an advert.  I guess the artist is supported (well the record company is supported) by advert revenue, which is "better" than P2P "sharing" mp3s put straight onto an mp3 player.

Interesting times.  The old model is dead.  A new model is forming, but what will it be?

Busy time of the year, I haven't been getting to play as much as I would like.  I did a tiny bit more work on Naudos "James Bond Theme", I play it once through each time I pick up the guitar - an important practise method I reckon.  Fingerstyle is not so much about training fingers, but about training the brain.  And the brain works best when you chuck stuff at it in small repetitive bursts.  60 minutes straight of playing the same thing over and over again is not as good value as playing 10 minutes over 6 days.

In the same way, I've played through all the songs I know twice this month; I'm at a point where I need to play for two hours to fit everything in!  Some songs have fallen out of my brain; I need to refer to my tabs to freshen them up.  Such is the need if you want to keep your songs ready!

In October 2011 Dark Side of the Moon was remastered and released.  There are "packs"; you can buy just the remastered album, the "experience" version which has some extras, and the "immersion" version which has a heap of extras.  I grabbed the experience version.  The remastered studio album had a few subtle changes I noticed, but not really enough to buy it outright, but it came with a 1974 live recording of Dark Side of the Moon at Wembley Stadium.  Really interesting to hear.  Not as "nice" as the studio album (that is probably just familiarity speaking) but I love how it shows what they doing with the album shortly after it was released, and how pink floyd were heading towards the next stuff to be released in later years.  I heard sounds and phrases that would be used on everything through to The Wall, possibly beyond.  Recommended for my fellow floyd aficionados.  Keeps my passion for the DSotM project alive :)

Another quite month on the guitar front ahead, but I'm still here!

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